


thousands of ghosts in the daylight

by nirav



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-10-13 03:48:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10505769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: Lucy Lane dies on a Tuesday.





	1. Chapter 1

Lucy Lane dies on a Tuesday afternoon in February.  Supergirl is still two minutes out even at superspeed and the bomb in Alex’s hands is going to go off in less than thirty seconds.  It’s cold enough that the last breath anyone sees her take, before she disappears out of the building with the bomb she yanked out of Alex’s hands, crystallizes in the air and seems to hang for long seconds after she’s gone, dissipating only when the explosion from outside rocks the entire building.

Inside, Alex fights against the bullet in her leg and the hands holding her back, her team stopping her from following Lucy.  The building shakes and pieces of concrete fall from the ceiling and everything goes silent except for Alex struggling to pull free.  Kara blows into the building to Alex cursing hoarsely at her team to let her go, her throat raw and her eyes shining and leg crumpling under her weight.

Lucy Lane dies on a Tuesday.

* * *

Lucy died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday Kara flies in through the open windows to Alex’s living room.  It’s three in the morning and Kara’s spent the last four hours flying aimlessly around the city, high enough that the cold air froze her tears.

Alex is awake, sitting on the floor of her living room, slumped back against the couch.  She’s still in her tactical gear, shoulders weighed down by the kevlar of her vest, her pants leg and the hardwood underneath is stained with dried blood from the gunshot wound.  Her legs are splayed out and a bottle of whiskey sits unopened between her knees.

Kara wipes at her own tears, wipes away the fact that every time she blinks she can see James doubling over in the middle of the DEO when J’onn delivered the news, swipes at her eyes and sucks in a breath and carries her catatonic sister into the bathroom.  Alex is deadweight, her mouth flat and eyes dry, and Kara strips her down and sits down on the floor of the shower with her and turns on the hot water.

Her uniform is soaked through and the bathroom is full of steam and the blood on Alex’s leg has washed away before she finally breaks, slumping against Kara’s side and curling around herself and crying.

It’s only the first day.

* * *

 

Wednesday floats by in a haze, rolling into Thursday silently, slowly, easily.  Alex’s phone is dead and she makes no effort to charge it.  Kara doesn’t leave the apartment until late afternoon, when a rush hour car crash calls for Supergirl’s strength.  Alex sends her out the window, making her promise to spend the evening with James so they can take care of each other.

It’s a Thursday night, and Alex Danvers sits alone on her couch with an unopened bottle of whiskey and a dead cell phone and no food in her apartment except for a box of protein bars.  It’s Thursday, and Lucy Lane died two days ago.

Alex twists the lid off the whiskey and takes a long sip.

* * *

“Alex.”

Alex doesn’t move, still sprawled on her couch, a half-empty bottle of whiskey tucked against her chest.

“Hey. Danvers.  Wake up.”

Still nothing.

“Alex!” It’s a shout this time, accompanied with a series of loud claps.  “Kara’s in trouble!”

“What—“ Alex snaps upright, disrupting the bottle and blinking against the sunlight leaking into her living room. 

Lucy stands in front of her, arms folded over her chest and forehead creased like she’s trying to solve a particularly complex logistics issue.

“Get with the program, Danvers,” Lucy says crossly.

“Lucy?”  Alex rubs at her eyes and blinks and opens her eyes wide, staring up at Lucy and the scrape highlighting the line of one cheekbone, raw and red and distorted from her frown.

“That would be me,” Lucy confirms. 

“But—you--”  Alex stares up at her, mouth hanging open and head aching under the confusion as much as the hangover.  “You’re gone.”

“Am I, though?”

Alex shakes her head and rubs at her eyes.  “I—yes?”  She shakes her head again. “No, you definitely—you  _ shot _ me and then you died.”

“I only shot you in the leg, it barely counts,” Lucy says with a wave of her hand.  She’s still wearing the gloves she’d had on when they went into the field, dusty and worn; her kevlar vest and combat boots are just as dusty, one pant leg ripped below the knee.  “And only because you were going to do something stupid like dive on an alien grenade—“

“Which  _ you _ did instead!” Alex yells.  “After you  _ shot _ me!”

“Can we move past the shooting thing, please, and deal with the problem at hand?” Lucy blows a lock of hair out of her face and glares down at Alex.

“What prob—“

“This one,” she says, reaching out with steady fingers to touch Alex’s cheek.  Alex sucks in a sharp breath because Lucy— _ Lucy _ , who’d disappeared in an explosion after dropping Alex with a bullet to the quadricep and sprinting out of the building with a ticking grenade in hand, who they’d barely started planning a funeral for, whose family still hadn’t been told she was dead, who had paused just before her melodramatically heroic sacrifice to press a too-brief kiss to the corner of Alex’s mouth and mumble  _ “Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” _ in her ear—is about to touch her, alive and well and—

Her hand passes right through Alex. 

“See?” Lucy says, huffing out an annoyed sigh and crossing her arms over her stomach once more.  “Slight problem.”

“You’re—I—“ Alex mumbles out, staring wide-eyed and too awake at Lucy, standing in her living room in immaculate tactical gear, incorporeal and irritated. 

“Don’t you dare say ghost,” Lucy mutters.  “I’m not dead.”

“I’m still drunk,” Alex says.  “This is a dream.”

“Your  _ sister _ is an alien but you can’t buy into the idea that technology exists somewhere in the universe that could make me incorporeal?” Lucy snaps.

“Oh,” Alex says faintly. 

“We didn’t know what that grenade was going to do,” Lucy says, pacing back and forth.  There’s no sound where her boots scuff along the hardwood.  “It was a gametime decision and we knew it was going to blow, somehow, some way, but we didn’t know  _ what _ way, right?  Just that the blast was likely going to be enough to drop the whole team.  So it stands to reason that it could have done some science mojo thing to make me incorporeal, right?”

“Right,” Alex echoes.  She rubs at her eyes and takes a slow breath in.  “Okay.  We have to—“

“Shower,” Lucy says firmly.  “You gotta shower, you smell like crappy whiskey.”

“I do not,” Alex mutters.

“You seriously do,” Lucy says with a sniff.  She pauses, reaching again for Alex; she pulls back halfway there and wraps her arms around her stomach.  One foot pokes out towards the whiskey bottle on the floor, but there’s no  _ clink _ when her steel-toed boot should hit the glass and instead just glides through it without disrupting the liquid inside.  “Are you okay?  That’s a lot of whiskey.”

“You died, Lucy,” Alex says, pulling her knees up to her chest.  It irritates the cleaned and bandaged bullethole in her thigh.  “You  _ died _ .  Gone.  You ki—you sacrificed yourself and saved my life, and you died.  We couldn’t even find your—“

“Alex,” Lucy says softly.  “I’m here.  I’m okay.”

“You shouldn’t have—it should have been me,” Alex says.  Her fingers dig into her shins, knuckles going pale and wrists aching.  “You shouldn’t have—“

“What do you think happens to Supergirl if anything happens to Alex Danvers?” Lucy says, sharp and short.  “Kara would set the world on fire for you, Alex, you know she would.  Like it or not, the world needs you to survive.”

“Kara wouldn’t—“

“She would,” Lucy says.  “She needs you, Alex.  So does J’onn.  God knows no one else can keep James out of trouble like you can.  I made the right call.”

“What about people who need you?”

Lucy exhales slowly and shakes her head.  “Doesn’t compare.  You’re the lynchpin, Alex.”

“Your family—“

“I’ve been in the military most of my life,” Lucy says softly.  “My family resigned itself to the possibility of me dying when I was eighteen and started at West Point.”

“What about me?  And Kara, and James?  We need you.  I need you.”

“You don’t—“

“Don’t tell me what I don’t need, Lucy,” Alex says, glaring across the room at her.  “Just because you’re incorporeal doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass.”

Lucy stares at her, shoulders dropped and hands hanging at her side.  “Okay,” she mumbles after a long moment.  She takes a deep breath and pulls her shoulders back up, arms folding back over her stomach once more.  “You really do smell like bad whiskey,” she adds, nose wrinkling.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Alex says.  “Ten minutes.  Don’t disappear again.”

“Har har,” Lucy says.  “Can you at least put on some music or something—“

“Nope,” Alex says over her shoulder. “Sit here in the quiet and think about how you got yourself into this mess.”

She rounds the corner into her bathroom, shutting the door behind her and pulling at her shirt, and Lucy’s head and shoulders pop through the door.

“Boo,” she shouts Alex’s ear, through the shirt she’s halfway pulled off, and then disappears back through the door by the time Alex has stubbed her toe on the base of the toilet and untangled herself from her shirt.

Alex curses loudly and Lucy smirks at the door.  Maybe this won’t be too terrible.


	2. Chapter 2

“How does that work?” Alex stares over at Lucy, car keys in hand and hovering by the steering wheel. Lucy raises an eyebrow and hooks one knee over the other. 

“What?”

“Sitting,” Alex says.  “If you can’t touch, how do you—how are you sitting?”

“You tell me, doc,” Lucy says with a shrug.  “I’m not the science person here.”

“I know  _ biology _ , this is—I don’t even know what this is.  Physics of some kind.”

“Not my fault you decided to study something useless,” Lucy says.  “Come on, let’s go.  I want to be back to normal ASAP.”

“Yeah, well,” Alex mumbles.  “Might not be that easy.”

“Don’t rain on my parade, Danvers,” Lucy says.  She snaps her fingers and flutters a hand at the car keys.

“If you can snap your fingers then—“

“Drive now, nerd later,” Lucy says over her.  “Chop chop.”

“I didn’t miss you at all,” Alex says with a glare, starting the car.  “Not even a little bit.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”  Lucy winks across the car at her. 

* * *

“Alex, you’re supposed to be rest—oh my God!” Kara flies across the room at Lucy so quickly the wind blows three comms officers right out of their chairs.  She skids right through Lucy, who still ducks instinctively, and cracks the wall when she slams into it.

“What,” J’onn says slowly. “Is going on?”

“Hey guys,” Lucy says with a wave.  “I’m not dead?”

Kara hops up to her feet, shaking concrete dust out of her clothes.  “Are you a ghost?”

“I’m not a ghost,” Lucy says.  “I’m just…ghost-adjacent.  I’m not dead.”

“How can you be sure?”  J’onn paces a slow circle around Lucy, who turns in time with him, hands clasped behind her back and posture military-straight.

“Because I don’t want to be dead?”

“But you—there was a bomb—“ Kara yanks her glasses off and squints at Lucy. 

“See anything?” Alex says quietly.

“No,” Kara says with a huff.  She reaches out and pokes at Lucy’s arm, and her hand slides right through her arm, landing somewhere in the middle of her chest.  Lucy glares at her and resettles her shoulders, chest shifting around Kara’s hand pointedly.

“Do you mind not fondling me just because I’m incorporeal?”

Kara yanks her hand back, clapping it over her mouth.  “I didn’t—I’m sorry—“

“Mean to stick your hand through my boobs?”

“Can we all please focus on the issue at hand?” J’onn says over Kara’s apologies and Alex’s groan.

“You mean the issue where Lucy is a ghost?”

“Ghost adjacent,” Kara says, hands shoved into her pockets.

“Whatever,” Alex mumbles.  “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not a ghost!” Lucy glares at Alex, who rolls her eyes and stalks off towards her lab, shutting the door behind her.

Lucy walks right through the door, popping through it to stand in front of Alex, who starts and nearly drops the empty coffee mug she’d just picked up.

“That’s going to get old really quickly,” Alex mutters.

“Consider it incentive to get me back into my real body.”

“Are you sure it’s a case of you being  _ out _ of your real body and not a case of your real body just being incorporeal?”

“You tell me, smartass,” Lucy grumbles.  “Sooner rather than later, if you would.”  She wanders around the lab, peering at the equipment and wrinkling her nose.  Alex glares at her for long seconds before turning back to her computer.

“Alex,” Lucy says after a few minutes.

“Trying to work here,” Alex says without looking away from her laptop.

“Sorry,” Lucy says, quietly enough that Alex pauses.  “I just—do my parents know?  About what happened to me?”

Alex turns around slowly, folding her hands in her lap.  “We haven’t told them yet, no.”

“Why not?”

Alex takes a deep breath, and then another, rubbing at her forehead and slumping back into her chair.  “I wanted to be the one who told them,” she says quietly.  “Because I was the one you saved.  I told J’onn I wanted to tell them, but I wasn’t ready.  I needed a few days.”

“Don’t tell them,” Lucy says.  “Even if you can’t get me back to how I’m supposed to be.  Let the mission report tell them.”

“Why—“

“Because if I’m going to be officially dead then I don’t want to die knowing that my father is going to blame you.”  Lucy paces back and forth in front of Alex’s desk, hands shoved into her pockets.  “We both know that he hates you, even if he doesn’t always hate Kara, because you always challenged him.  He’ll ruin you if he thinks it’s your fault I died.”

“Isn’t it, though?”  Alex drops her chin into her hands, slumping over her desk.  “Lucy, you literally dove on a grenade for me. You shot me so I couldn’t do exactly what you did, I’ve got the bullet wound in my leg to prove it.  You saved me and our entire team.”

“Come on, Alex,” Lucy says softly.  “Not that I don’t like everyone on that team but you have to know that I wasn’t thinking about the DEO tac team when I did it.” 

Alex pulls the cap off a pen and clicks it back on, over and over, eyes locked on the methodical movement.  “Can we talk about that?” she asks after a long moment.

“Talk about what?” Lucy blinks owlishly at her, even as she stops her pacing and shrinks back towards the closed door.

“Lucy,” Alex says with a sigh.

“I just-- clarity, you know?” Lucy waves her hands around in a useless swirl.   “I guess I realized that...I don’t know.  I always thought we would have time, someday, and then it turned out that we wouldn’t and I just...regretted it.”

“Regretted what?” Alex says slowly.  “You turned me down.  Ages ago.”

“Oh, come on, Alex,” Lucy says with half of a smile.  “You know that wasn’t because I didn’t want you.”

* * *

_ “Please tell me those aren’t for me,” Lucy says with a groan. _

_ Alex drops the stack of reports down on her desk with a flourish.  “These are for you.” _

_ Lucy slumps back in her chair.  “That’s not nice, Agent Danvers.” _

_ “So sorry that you have to finish your own paperwork, Agent Lane,” Alex says with a smirk.  She leans against the doorframe to Lucy’s office, the one directly across from hers that she can see straight into when she leans back in her chair at her own desk.  They’d spent half an hour earlier in the afternoon shooting rubber bands across the hallway, Alex winning by a landslide in the unofficial competition that had formed out of a mutual irritation at paperwork. _

_ “I’m going to die in this office,” Lucy says.  “You’ll find my decomposing body under piles of paperwork.” _

_ “Yeah, yeah,” Alex says.  “Finish them tomorrow.  It’s late.” _

_ “In a little while,” Lucy says, head lolling to the side to glance at the clock. _

_ “Come on,” Alex says.  “Let’s go get a drink.  I’ll even give you a ride home.” _

_ “I need to finish up here.” _

_ “Lucy,” Alex says with a roll of her eyes.  “It can wait to tomorrow.  It’s late, just let me take you home.” _

_ One of Lucy’s eyebrows twitches, and Alex groans quietly at how it had sounded. _

_ “How very forward of you, Agent Danvers,” Lucy drawls, pen twirling between her fingers.  “Not until at least the second date.” _

_ “Then let me take you on a date,” Alex blurts out.  Her eyes go wide for a brief moment because she  _ definitely  _ used to be smoother at asking girls out and-- _

_ “A date?” Lucy says slowly, blinking up at her.   _

_ “I mean,” Alex starts, before cutting herself off and squaring her shoulders.  “Yes.  A date.” _

_ “You want to go on a date,” Lucy says.  “With me?” _

_ “Yes.” _

_ “Oh,” Lucy says faintly.  She clears her throat and fiddles with her pen.  “I-- I’m sorry, I don’t think--”  She pauses and takes a deep breath against the way Alex’s is already smiling wryly at her, as if this was to expected.  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.” _

_ “Yeah, of course,” Alex says, glancing down at her feet for a short moment before looking back up at Lucy, smile pasted across her face.  “Don’t stay here all night, yeah?”  She waves awkwardly and backs out of the office, rotating back towards her own and waiting until her back is to Lucy to grimace. _

* * *

__

“Still,” Alex says softly.  

“We work together, Alex.”  Lucy pushes a hand through her hair and huffs out a breath.  “And it’s just complicated, because of James, and Kara, and I just-- I figured there would be a chance, once our lives were less crazy.”

“What kind of chance?”

“Are you trying to bait me until I just come out and say it?” Lucy glares down at Alex, smiling in spite of herself and shrugging with her entire body.  “I like you, Alex Danvers, and I want to go on a date with you.”

“Too bad you had to wait until you’re a  _ ghost _ to tell me that,” Alex grumbles.

“Rude.” Lucy rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue.  “Find a way to fix me and then I’ll take you out for drinks.  Deal?”

“Oh, no,” Alex say, pointing sharply at her.  “You owe me drinks  _ and _ dinner.  Consider it accrued interest.”

“Accrued-- I can’t believe I’m attracted to you,” Lucy mutters.  She crosses her arms over her chest.  “Fine.  Drinks and dinner, on me.  I might even throw in dessert if we’re feeling wild.”

“How magnanimous,” Alex says.  “Now go away so I can work, unless you want to answer about nine hundred questions I have.”

Lucy blows a kiss in her direction and walks back out through the wall, head and shoulders popping back through briefly to blow another kiss at Alex before disappearing once more..

“Stop doing that!” Alex yells after her.  She takes a deep breath as Lucy disappears, slumping down at her desk.  For the first time in hours-- days, really; since she’d been left bleeding on the ground to watch Lucy sprint away with a ticking bomb in her hands-- the ache in her stomach, persistent and sharp and hollow, starts to unknot and fade away.


End file.
